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How to Move Rankings Up On Older, Existing Content – Whiteboard Friday

May 16, 2013 by randfish

Posted by randfish Many owners of established, older pages are facing a similar issue: they’ve been ranking decently for a keyword for some time, but they want to move into the coveted number one spot. However, older pages don’t drive a ton of new press, new social signals, or awareness. If you want to boost your rankings for the same keyword you’ve been targeting for awhile, how can you move up to move the needle on your business? Adjusting your existing, quality content can be used to help bump your site up in the SERPs. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand lays out the tactics you can use to boost your older page to the next level! How to Move Rankings Up On Older, Existing Content – Whiteboard Friday Here is a screenshot of the whiteboard used in today’s video: Video Transcription “Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I want to get a little down in the gritty details. Sometimes you’ve got a situation like this. Someone’s performed a search for air conditioners. You’re ranking number four. From an SEO perspective your real need is not, “Let me expand things and look at bunch of different channels.” It’s, “If I could move this ranking up, I could really move the needle on our business because this is a highly performing, a highly converting term, and I really want to move it just on this particular piece.” Hyper-tactical, but it’s good to know all the ways that you can move the needle on this. So if you want to go from number four to number three to number two and you’ve got essentially an older page, not a new page – so you’re not getting lots of new press, attention, or awareness, driving all these social signals, etc. – and you’re not targeting a new keyword, you have this kind of stale, older page and you want to get it ranking, there’s a bunch of tactics that you can pursue, and I want to talk about each of them in a bit of detail. So number one, point more external links to the URL. This is probably the most classic thing that folks in the SEO field have done over the last decade, 12 years. It does work, and it still does work, although it’s less powerful than it used to be because search engines, Google in particular, are looking at such a broader set of figures and data sources for their ranking signals. However, a few things about this. This is going to be pretty darn hard to do with commercial content. It’s much easier if you got educational or non-promotional stuff, because reaching out and getting links from other types of folks, from other websites is much easier when it’s authentic and not directly promotional or not directly revenue generating, that kind of thing. Now this is much easier for folks who are in like a non-profit space or in an educational or content space because they can reach out and say, “Hey, I have this great resource. I think your people might like it. Do you want to shoot over a link to it? Can I contribute something to your site and point to it?” Yes. It’s much harder to do that when you have a page that’s ranking for air conditioners and you’re just trying to beat out three other e-commerce retailers for air conditioners. This is the way it goes. I do have some specific recommendations. I’m not going to dive into every one of these, but these are the tactics that, in my experience, work the best. So that’s guest content, basically when you’re writing on other people’s sites. Of course, just like everything, it’s got to be authentic, got to be high quality. You can’t just be spamming other people’s sites or submitting to really low quality ones. Promotions do tend to work pretty well. If you’re doing a promotion on your air conditioners, other people may pick that up. You can get press and attention, social attention. Partnerships can work well. Testimonials and reviews. So other people who are writing reviews about maybe an air conditioner line that you’ve just launched, or someone’s writing a review about a new air conditioner that’s come out, and you happen to be the retailer featuring that, you can be included in those types of places. List inclusion, if you know about a list that already exists where people are covering places to get air conditioners online, you can get included in those. Again, be really careful. You don’t want to go to those spammy, generic directories. You want to be going to high-quality lists. CNET Reviews is very different from Articles-about-electronics-online.info. Apologies if that’s your site. If not, we should register it. I’m kidding. Press and blogs, of course. Social media pushes you can do, especially if you’ve got something to announce around air conditioners. Summer’s coming up, right? A Facebook page, a push on Pinterest, a push on Twitter, or on Google+. Link reclamation, meaning you go back and find places that used to link to you that don’t anymore, places that used to link to your competition but those links are now broken. You can go talk to those kinds of folks. Those are the kinds of link building techniques that have worked best, in my experience. Please be so super careful not to build the wrong links. If you haven’t watched it already, Matt Cutts has been tweeting and talking in video – Matt Cuts being the head of the Web Spam Team at Google – talking about how they’re going to be taking even more aggressive action than what they took with Penguin in a Penguin 2.0 algorithm that’s coming out in the next few weeks. So just please be super cautious about where you’re getting these external link sources from. Especially since links are a little less powerful than they used to be and because a lot of the linking sources are more dangerous than they once were, there are some other ways I want to mention. Those include increasing your click-through rate. Now, I’m not trying to say here that correlation equals causation, or that it even implies that, but what we do know is more people clicking through on your listing means fewer people clicking through to your competitors and a higher chance that some of those people are going to take actions that we know does increase ranking, so things like linking to you and sharing you and those kinds of things. Your page is clearly providing a more compelling experience. That tends to be exactly what Google’s algorithm is trying to accomplish, and so increasing your click-through rate can help with this. One of the ways that this can be done, and this is not to say that Google is sort of biased to people who do it, but if you supplement with PPC, with paid search ads, it tend to be the case, and lots of people have tried different tests around this and gotten different performance, but, on average, it tends to be the case that one plus one equals a little more than two. I put 2.25 for that. Your mileage may vary. But basically, if I take a look over here and I’ve got my air conditioner page and I also have an ad on the sidebar or on the top up here, it tends to be the case that the click-through rate here, plus the click-through rate here, is a little more than if I just had a paid ad or if I just had the organic listing. So two listings on the page slightly better than one and one. So that’s certainly an angle you can try again. Again, I urge you to test this, not to just take it on blind faith. Included in that test methodology should be testing modifications to the title and the description. So if your air conditioner page here has got a description and a title and a URL – the URL matters too, and you can do things like 301 redirect the old one to a new one – this can move the needle. I have found a lot of the time that what I’d call keyword-stuffed, kind of SEO 1.0, back in the late ’90s, early 2000s type of things where it says, “Air conditioners, your air conditioners, get the best air conditioners here,” followed by a brand name that’s kind of off, after what people can see in the title in the search results, doesn’t perform nearly as well as a brand people recognize, a compelling title that has a little bit of authenticity, a little bit of your brand and your culture and your unique value proposition embedded right in the title and the description. The same story with the URL. Lots of hyphens separating something, a longer URL, a dynamic URL versus one that has readable keywords in it and readable text in there. Again, you’re going for authenticity. You’re going for, “Boy, what would I click on? What do I tend to click on? What do people like?” Think of this just like you’d think of a paid search ad. You want to optimize all the areas of this and try and test it and get better performance out of that click-through rate. Another thing you can obviously do is add rich snippets. These are things like we could add a video to the page and add the video XML sitemap so that we get the video markup next to that result. We could add rel=author and get our profile picture next to it, assuming we connected with Google+. For some types of rich snippet results, recipes in particular, news items, you can add images and get those in there. For other types of results, air conditioners, any ecommerce result, you can have star reviews and number of reviews. All of those things can help move the needle on click-through rate. Number three, improve and revitalize the page’s content itself. Again, this isn’t always a direct needle mover. It can be indirect. But Google is pretty sophisticated with analyzing content. Better content, I don’t mean better content in terms of it has more keywords stuffed into it, or better content in terms of it just happens to be longer or more in-depth. I mean more compelling, more uniquely valuable, more interesting, more worthy of being shared, more special. That kind of stuff tends to perform better in Google. They’ve got a wide variety of text-based content analysis algorithms that tell them all sorts of stuff about a page, not just keywords and TFIDF and stuff like that. So things like rich media, video, images, graphics, the layout design, the user experience, the visual aesthetics, how the page looks, these actually can move the needle, not just on how it performs in the search results, but how it performs in terms of conversion rate. Conversion rate actually tends to be tied pretty nicely to how it performs in search results, because again, Google is looking at all those pieces of the algorithm, trying to piece together what provides the best experience for our users. Text content too. I’m not just talking about keywords. I’m talking about that unique value. If you haven’t seen the Whiteboard Friday on unique value versus unique content, you should check that out. I know I didn’t have enough room, so I switched sides. Number four, internal links and redirects. So there are a few things that can happen here. Sometimes you have an orphaned page. It’s only linked to from one section. You’ve got to drill way deep down into a subcategory or sub-subcategory to find this page on your site. E-commerce sites are particularly messy with this kind of stuff a lot of the time. Make sure that the page is getting link love, internal link love, relevant link love. I’m not talking about stuffing an anchor text-rich link in the footer of every page or the category section or something like that. I’m talking about when you have pages that are relevant to air conditioning, you have a page on summer appliances, you have a page on electronics, you have a page on what should homeowners be thinking about to upgrade their homes, great. Make sure that you’re linking to your air conditioner page. Those are relevant pages where people would want to see that. If you’re confused, do an “air conditioners”site:yourdomain. See all the pages where you mentioned it, and yet have somehow failed to link over to your air conditioner’s page that you actually got. Consolidation. This is a really powerful one. So this is essentially saying, “I’m going to take all the pages that are targeting that same term or phrase and 301 them all together.” We’ve done this a number of times on Moz, because we’ll have a bunch of old blog posts or old content pages that are all talking about exactly the same thing. Then we go, “Man, why do we have seven of these? And, by the way, six of them are more than three years old.” Let’s just take those and 301 them back to the most relevant, most high-quality content. If we have some content that was on those other pages that we want to put on the existing one, let’s do that. Let’s consolidate so people don’t get lost in terms off which is the most relevant page about air conditioners on your site. Google shouldn’t be confused about that either, and that can actually really move the needle. I’ve seen that a number of times pop us from page two to page one, or pop us from the bottom of page one to the top five results, that kind of stuff. Number five, newer signal, but something that I’m pretty sure in this year’s ranking factors is going to prove to be very interesting, and that is branding, co-occurrence, and mentions. What I mean by this is if your brand name, that’s usually your domain name and usually your company name as well, is often connected with the words “air conditioners” – by connected I mean connected when the press talks about you, when third party sites talk about you, when people blog about you, when social media users talk about you – if those words tend to appear frequently together, your brand plus thing you want to rank for, you tend to do quite well. We’ve seen some early signals that mentions, that co-occurrence of terms, phrases plus brand can really move the needle. So don’t ignore that either. All right. Hope these five techniques are things that you can try out. Share your experiences with the rest of the Whiteboard Friday readers in the comments, and I’ll look forward to seeing you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.” Video transcription by Speechpad.com Sign up for The Moz Top 10 , a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

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How to Move Rankings Up On Older, Existing Content – Whiteboard Friday

Filed Under: Advertising, affiliate marketing, articles, Beginner, blogging, conversion, Ecommerce, email marketing, facebook, Featured, Google, Google: Analytics, How To, Interviews, keywords, Link Building, linkedin, location, Marketing, mitt, online marketing, Paid Search, phil internet marketing and social media and seo, PPC, research, sea, Search Marketing, seo, social media, success, Testimonials, Top News, traffic, twitter, Video, websites Tagged With: alternative, business, facebook, friends, linkedin, management, marketing, web-design

Site Audits: Deliverables, Follow Up, and Implementation

May 16, 2013 by JonQ

Posted by JonQ This post was originally in YouMoz , and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. You could be the best SEO in the world, with the best recommendations your clients ever seen; but if this information isn’t presented and communicated in the right way, the sad fact is that your hard work probably won’t change a thing. A couple of weeks back, Dan and I ran a very enjoyable Mozinar on this very topic. (A huge thank you to everyone who listened in!) If you did miss it, feel free to check out the recording and download the slides here . Rather than talking through the ins and outs of technical SEO, we really wanted to dive into what, in our experience, makes the difference between a site audit being left on the shelf, compared to a document that can potentially turn a business around. On the back end of the Mozinar, we had a ton of great questions. Many focused specifically on the delivery and follow-up process, and how we approach this particular part of the job. There was quite a bit of interest in this area, so we thought a dedicated post on the latter part of our auditing process (see below) would give us a chance to dive in a little deeper. Although the follow-up and implementation clearly comes once your document has been delivered, a lot of the very early conversations have a big influence on how successful the project will ultimately end up being. I’ve found that getting a client in the mind-set of working together and buying into implementing your recommendations right from the start always makes getting work done so much easier! Although this post is about the follow-up process, I also want to spend some time touching on other areas that have a direct influence on that part of the project. Let’s go! Sales kick-off and briefing The sales process is such a critical part of any project; and not just for the obvious reasons. A well thought out sales conversation is the ideal opportunity to discuss goals, understand the clients business, and really find out what they need to achieve. Ron Garrett summed it up brilliantly in this post , and covered some great points with regards to the important details that every initial conversation with a potential client should cover. In terms of how the conversations held at the beginning of a project can impact on the effectiveness of your follow-up, it’s so important to make sure you’re starting the project with the right goals in mind. After all, how can you measure success if you don’t understand what KPIs make a true difference to your clients business? Q: How much should I give away during the sales process? On a very similar point, we had a couple of questions crop up in the Mozinar Q&A from people asking how much to give away during the sales process. Some people like to run a sample audit, whilst others won’t give anything away until they have ink on paper. Really, this is down to you. From my perspective, you have to be sensible with your time and learn to consider each situation by its own circumstances. I’ve been in the situation many times before where you sense the company in question is just inviting agencies to pitch in order to gain some free expert knowledge. It takes time to put a proposal together, so you have to make a judgement on the best use of that time. Feel each situation out and you should be just fine. This is not just about selling projects; it’s about understanding the situation well enough to sell the right project to solve the right problem. Kick-off and briefing If you take a step back and think about all the projects you’ve worked on that haven’t worked out well, it’s crazy to think how much probably went wrong before you’d even started. If everyone was in an honest mood, I think we’d all admit to being involved in projects before where it all felt just a little too rushed. As a result, a good solid brief can be skipped meaning the team get dropped in with no idea at all of delivery dates, or what the client actually wants or needs from the project. Clearly, things don’t tend to go well from here. At best, the project just ends up being another report on another desk – at worst reputations get damaged. So with implementation and a smooth follow-up in mind, what should a good brief cover? As a bare minimum, I suggest the following should always be included: Deliverables Key dates Goals/objectives KPIs Key personnel Why is this so important? One of the biggest and most common reasons for a project failing is that for a variety of reasons they simply miss the mark. Usually when a project doesn’t tick the right boxes, the issue can nearly always be traced back to the brief or a miscommunication at the start. The other point here is that if the project is simply being dumped on the team, they’re not likely to be too happy about it. Get your team excited and they in turn will get the client excited. If the client is excited about getting things done, suddenly getting work implemented is a far more enjoyable and productive process. Deliverables A major part of any project is the format in which you present your documentation. Sometimes a “highlights” presentation deck detailing the biggest issues is the way to go, whereas some situations require a detailed document and a large set of data to refer to. The best way to do this is really going to depend on who you’re delivering to, and what the initial outline of the project was. We had some really good questions on this during the webinar, so it felt right to pick out some of the best and answer them directly: Q: What exactly should be delivered? A large document, a set of data, or just the top ten action points? At SEOgadget, we’ve found that the best approach is to do a combination of all three, with the exact delivery style adjusted to whomever you’re meeting or presenting to. A typical situation for us would be to create a master document containing detailed explanations of our findings alongside all the necessary change requests. Of course, if we’re running crawls and conducting log-file analysis then there’s also going to be a pretty substantial amount of data on hand too. I like delivering the data for two reasons: first, data always backs up what you’re recommending. It’s always so much more valuable to show and not tell. Having the ability to clearly walk the client through exactly what you’ve found can work wonders for adding credibility to what you’re saying. Second, providing the data makes it much easier for a developer to work out what’s going on and gives a reference point for future questions should anything crop up. What’s more, in 90% of situations clients always ask for the data anyway! Task lists also have a very valuable place. The first question that always comes back is, “OK, so where do we start?” If a question keeps cropping up, then answer it before it gets asked! At the top of all our documents we provide a prioritized list of all change requests (as seen above). This forms a great base for follow-up calls and meetings as everyone can refer back to the same task list. With development resource often being high in demand, it also enables you to start scheduling the biggest fixes first. Q: Some clients are not “techy,” and talking them website audit is not that easy. How many details we should give those clients? Should we spent a lot time and train them about SEO? This is where being able to give a high-level view first is extremely important. Not everyone understands the details of SEO. You might not always be working directly with an SEO department; you could be working with a traditional marketing team or leading into an Ecommerce manager where their role touches on SEO, but it’s not something they do all day every day. In this case, the best approach is to deliver a “highlights” type of presentation. Break the problems down and focus on the benefits of resolving the issues. Show the client what you’ve found, but think more about explaining the benefits of fixing each issue will have on their business. It’s less about canonical tags and more about ROI. Again, get the client excited about the impact of fixing things and you’ll buy yourself a heap of influence. Even though you’re only presenting on a few key areas, you’ll still have the full document to refer back to in more detail later down the line. Follow-up support I’m a big believer in the idea that a technical project shouldn’t be about completing a review and then thinking it’s “job done.” It’s so much more important to have the ability to really influence change and action. In fact, the most important part (and often hardest part!) of any technical audit is the follow-up process and getting your work implemented. A good SEO can diagnose issues – a great SEO follows up and makes sure these problems get fixed. Going right back to what we touched on earlier when talking about the sales process, having a good grasp of development resource can really help here. Do you have an understanding of what processes are in place for booking requests? Did you check when development resource is available and allocated for SEO? Getting ahead of the game in these areas is one of the biggest keys to winning! The follow-up process can be greatly helped by having a central resource to track changes and keep on top of progress or indeed challenges with implementing your recommendations. Using tools such as Basecamp or Asana can be a great way of keeping communication clear, and for making sure you have the right tasks in front of the right people. If you’re not keen on using these tools, a simple Google Docs sheet to display tasks and provide a place to leave comments is sometimes all that’s needed. Combining this with regular calls or checking in via email gives you the ability to keep the project moving in the right direction, and the retain focus when you come to catching up in a meeting or on a call. If you’ve got any further questions on the process side of technical SEO audits, feel free to drop them in the comments, or tweet myself or Dan and we’ll do our best to answer them. Sign up for The Moz Top 10 , a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Continued here:
Site Audits: Deliverables, Follow Up, and Implementation

Filed Under: Advertising, affiliate marketing, articles, Beginner, blogging, boxing, conversion, Ecommerce, email marketing, facebook, Featured, Google, Google: Analytics, How To, In House, Interviews, Link Building, linkedin, location, Marketing, online marketing, Paid Search, phil internet marketing and social media and seo, research, Sales, sales process, sea, Search Marketing, seo, social media, success, Top News, traffic, twitter, Video Tagged With: alternative, business, development, ecommerce, facebook, friends, legal, management, online marketing, search-engine, social media, web-design

#MozCon 2013 Agenda

May 13, 2013 by Erica McGillivray

Posted by Erica McGillivray Holy cannoli, it’s MozCon 2013 Agenda time! July 8th-July 10th here in Seattle are going to be out-of-this-world. I know many of you have been asking for the complete MozCon schedule, and we’ve been working hard with all our 2013 speakers to find those perfect words to express how awesome MozCon’s going to be. I’m thrilled for the variety of programming we’ll have from local SEO and mobile content strategy to video and marketing analytics. There will be plenty of amazingess to fill your brain. You’ll see that we have some MozCon favorites returning like Avinash Kaushik, Wil Reynolds, and Joanna Lord, and we’ve invited some great new folks like Kyle Rush, Karen McGrane, and Dana DiTomaso. Those are some insanely smart industry experts! You’ll learn a ton of actionable info to take home and start implementing on your site(s) right after MozCon. And for those of you wanting to know about the party… This year we’re raising the roof of the EMP Museum. That’s right, we wanted to meet and greet our community while hiding from Daleks. We’ve listened to your needs, and the EMP’s amazing space works for those who want to rock out to karaoke as well as those interested in quieter conversations with a new friend. Sing your heart out if you choose. If that hasn’t got you purchasing your ticket yet… MozCon 2013 Agenda Monday 8:00am – 9:00am Breakfast 9:00 am – 9:30am Intro: The Year in SEO, Marketing, and Moz with Rand Fishkin 9:30am – 10:00am Really Targeted Outreach with Richard Baxter We’ve all sent guest post pitches and “link building requests” and begged for precious links any way and anywhere we can. But, that simply isn’t marketing. We have all the tools for a better way of finding our audience and determining what they love. Richard will show you a data-driven approach to marketing your brand to your target audience. No more guesswork, you’ll know exactly how to get the right eyeballs on your content. 10:00am – 10:30am International SEO and the Future of Your ROI with Aleyda Solis Take a bold step into the international market. Aleya will walk you through how to calculate the possible ROI of international sales, how to sell it to your boss or client, and the practical how-to’s of international implementation on your site. 10:30am – 10:50am Break 10:50am – 11:50am Simplifying Complexity: Three Ideas For Higher ROI with Avinash Kaushik One of the awesome realities of our existence is that we have to deal with a lot of complexity. Often the natural response to that is to try and overpower that with even more complexity. In this session, we’ll apply the Occam’s Razor to three user cases and learn practical tips. 11:50am – 1:20pm Lunch 1:20pm – 1:50pm Wordless Wednesdays: How to Swaggerjack the Power of Visual Memes with Lena West Image-heavy, responsive websites are all the rage, but can be problematic for SEO, load times, and other inbound marketing concerns. But how does this balance out with the popularity of images-based memes like “Wordless Wednesday”? Lena will examine these visual memes and their impact on traffic, and she’ll talk about how you can parlay the power of visual memes into serious search and traffic results. 1:50pm – 2:20pm Rapid Fire Link Building Tips for Your Content with Ross Hudgens You’ve built your content and made it King. Now what? Ross teaches you how to take your content and turn it into links for your site. Whether you’re just hunting for backlinks or building up social shares, you’ll find all the tips to get your community engaged and building those links for you. 2:20pm – 3:00pm Hot Off the Press: 2013 Ranking Factors with Matt Peters Moz’s data scientist Dr. Matt walks you through the 2013 Ranking Factors. He’ll be breaking down Google’s cutting-edge ways of how they figure out if your pages are relevant beyond keywords. You’ll walk away with an understanding of the data and the knowledge to craft a sound SEO strategy. 3:00pm – 3:30pm Strings to Things: Entities and SEO with Matthew Brown In the last year, Google and Bing have both indicated a shift to entity-based search results as part of their evolution. Google has unscored this point with rich snippets and Knowledge Graph, and Bing has now upped the ante on personal search results with Bing Snapshots. Find out how you can adopt strategies to stay ahead of the curve in the new world of semantic search results. 3:30pm – 3:50pm Break 3:50pm – 4:20pm The Mobile Content Mandate with Karen McGrane Do you think “no one will ever want to do that on mobile”? Chances are, someone already wants to. Karen will discuss why you need to deliver content wherever your customer wants to consume it — and the risks of ignoring mobile users. She’ll also explain how to start your mobile content strategy, define what you want to publish, construct the relationship between your mobile and desktop site, and evolve your editorial workflow and content management tools. 4:20pm – 4:50pm Building a Better Business with Digital Marketing with Mackenzie Fogelson Extraordinary businesses and communities are built with a higher purpose than just making money. Mack will walk you through how you can achieve bigger objectives for your clients or for your own business. Using the power of digital marketing tools (along with passion and hard work), you’ll learn how to shape and foster your company and the community around it. 4:50 – 5:20pm The 7 Heavenly Habits of Inspired Inbound Marketers with Dharmesh Shah Curious about how some of the world’s best inbound marketers work? How do they come up with ideas for content? What’s their policy on handling Twitter mentions? How much do they really spend on A/B testing? Dharmesh will walk you through these habits and more. Tuesday 8:00am – 9:00am Breakfast 9:00am – 9:30am Building a Winning Video Marketing Strategy with Phil Nottingham Phil’s going to guide to you through the process of building a video content strategy from inception to launch. He’ll explain the creative and technical tactics required to win the internet with video. By the end of this session, you’ll know where to host your video, how to optimize it, what kind of content you should be creating, and how to get professional quality returns without spending a fortune. 9:30am – 9:45am The Next Generation of Mozscape with Phil Smith As we crawl the web, collecting data, our Mozscape has run into a few pitfalls as we’ve grown. Phil’s been working on an incremental indexing for the next generation of Mozscape, and he’ll give you insights on how this faster, fresher, and scalable index will be useful to you. 9:45am – 10:00am How to Moz Lingo: Cross-Team Communication When Crisis Hits with Carin Overturf Mozzy does not alway mean bright and shiny. Sometimes things go south, and it’s these times when good communication across all teams, technical and not-so-technical, is critical. Carin brings the tactics she’s learned about effective crisis management after surviving a few storms as a technical manager on the Mozscape team. 10:00am – 10:15am Empower Your Customers to Become Your Evangelists with Aaron Wheeler You have the power to turn customers into one of your strongest, most cost-effective marketing teams. By creating great experiences for customers during good times and bad, they’ll share their successes and demonstrate the value you’ve given them to a broader audience, much to the delight of your marketing and customer service teams. 10:15am – 10:30am Engineer Your Life: Agile for Work and Play with Miranda Rensch Agile development, it’s not just for software companies anymore. Miranda will show us how you can use an agile process to plan anything from side-projects, marketing launches, and personal improvement goals. You’ll come away with templates and processes to try in your own team or at home! 10:30am – 10:50am Break 10:50am – 11:20am Let’s Play for Keeps: Building Customer Loyalty with Joanna Lord We all know that customer loyalty is a key ingredient in building brands, hitting revenue goals, and cultivating a community. Joanna will walk you through how the landscape has changed, and she’ll leave you with tools and tips on how to build customer loyalty that lasts. 11:20am – 11:50pm Ecommerce SEO: Cutting Edge Tactics That Scale with Adam Audette Fight Panda and other modern SEO realities by using the best on-page techniques and content strategies for your ecommerce site. Adam teaches you how to sustainably improve your click-through-rates as SERPs become noisier and properly prepare for G+ and Graph Search. Then he’ll round things out be giving practical advice on how to build your ecommerce team and work flows. 11:50pm – 1:20pm Lunch 1:20pm – 1:50pm Building Your Business: Relationship and Other Critical “Soft” Skills with Brittan Bright Ever dealt with a difficult client or a boss who just didn’t understand? Brittan teaches you essential relationship building skills and tips and tricks for making your business interactions smooth and easy. Whether you’re always putting out fires or pitching new ideas, you won’t want to miss this. 1:50pm – 2:20pm Win Through Optimization and Testing with Kyle Rush Kyle shares his knowledge from the front lines of the most intense web campaign to date: the 2012 US presidential election. His team won big for Obama with a data-driven approach. Kyle will explore tactics like how they increased donations by 49% and help you implement these wins for your site. 2:20pm – 2:50pm How Gender and Cultural Differences in Web Psychology Affect the Customer Experience with Nathalie Nahai Are you missing half your audience? Your site may be giving off the wrong psychology signals and causing potential customers to click away. Nathalie covers how gender and cultural differences impact your business and winning tactics to change the message and convert more customers. 2:50pm – 3:20pm Breaking Up with Your Keyword-Based KPIs with Annie Cushing Raise your hand if you hate (not provided)? Annie shows you how to raise your battle cry by finding your keyword data elsewhere. By changing your focus from (not provided) to what your landing pages can tell you, you’ll be able to audit your site even better than before. 3:20pm – 3:40pm Break 3:40pm – 4:10pm Next Level Local Tactics: Making Your SEO Stand Out with Dana DiTomaso Competing against giant brands in the Local SEO space can be daunting, but Dana’s here to turn your epic battle into an epic win. She’ll show you how to put personality into your local search efforts so that local searchers want to know who you are. Dana’s practical tactics and advice for thinking around the problem will crank your creativity up to 120%. 4:10pm – 4:40pm End-to-End Local Optimization with David Mihm The paradox of Local Search has always been that it’s one of SEO’s most time-consuming areas, and yet, the businesses who stand to gain the most have the smallest budgets and limited internal resources. Whether you’re an agency serving SMB clients or a large brand with hundreds of locations, scaling your efforts is critical. Learn how to increase the efficiency of your Local optimization process with these tips and tools from David. 4:40pm – 5:10pm Cater to Your Audience via UX with Allison Urban User experience is critical to making your audience feel your site, services, or products are for them. Allison will use case studies to show why UX matters and how it conveys respect for your customers. Then she’ll deliver tactics and advice she learned while working on MailChimp’s redesign. 5:10pm – 5:40pm Living in the Future of User Behavior with Will Critchlow As the technology space constantly changes, users and their behavior adjust with the tide. But what should we do? Will takes a look at where the trends are going and gives you the tactics and tips to keep up and maybe get ahead of the game. 7:30pm – 11:00pm Party at the EMP Wednesday 08:00am – 9:00am Breakfast 9:00am – 9:40am Beyond 10 Blue Links: The Future of Ranking with Pete Meyers In the year since we launched MozCast, the face of Google has changed dramatically. We’ve seen the roll-out of 7-result SERPs, the rapid expansion of Knowledge Graph, mass-adoption of authorship, and dozens of new features, rich snippets, and widgets. Ranking is no longer just a number, and achieving it is a moving target. Find out how to think like a brand and carve out a place in the SERP of the future. 9:40am – 10:10am Using Metrics to Build Social Media Engagement with Carrie Gouldin Between Edgerank, noise, and upcoming networks, social metics are daunting. Carrie will show you what makes interesting content, how to track links, read metrics, and keep your followers hungry for more. By testing and trying new things, she’s built up a 25-50% engagement rate for ThinkGeek’s Facebook and you can too for your brand. 10:10am – 10:30am Break 10:30am – 11:00am The Search for Company Culture and Why It Matters with Sarah Bird Whether you realize it or not, your company has a culture. Is it helping you or holding you back? Learn how to identify your company culture, foster the culture you want, and avoid common pitfalls. Sarah will share what she’s learned at Moz, and why what works for one company might not work for yours. 11:00am – 12:00pm Why the Internet Hates Us and Can #RCS Change That Perception? with Wil Reynolds Post-MozCon 2012, Wil has been focused on helping you get things done by using #RCS paired with facts and figures from his own company, his clients, and insights from 30 members of top US design agencies. He’s also been reviewing the successes, the failures, and the steps his team put into place for change. Wil wants to get the word out that it’s time to stop chasing all the shiny SEO shortcuts! 12:00pm – 1:30pm Lunch 1:30pm – 2:00pm Building Your Community From the Ground Up with Jen Lopez What if we had to start over and rebuild the Moz community from scratch? Jen walks us through the steps, from how to start building an audience all the way through to how she’d build her team. Learn actionable tactics and deep insights that you can apply to building your community, both internally and externally, for your business. 2:00pm – 3:20pm Community Speakers! This could be you! We’re having four community speakers. Have you tossed your hat in the ring? Applications due Tuesday, May 14th at 5pm PDT. 3:20pm – 3:40pm Break 3:40pm – 4:40pm The Secret Ingredients of Better Marketing with Rand Fishkin Content bombards our online experience. Ads and salespeople interrupt us. But every now and then, marketing is truly remarkable and its message transforms from unwelcome to irresistible What makes it stand out? Why do some companies inspire us to take action and to share them? The ingredients have been hidden too long. It’s time we discovered the what, why, and how behind crafting better marketing. 4:40pm – 5:10pm Ultimate Q&A Get your questions answered by our amazing speakers. Unlike the traditional give-it-up, Ultimate Q&A gives you the opportunity to pinpoint what amazing tips you’d like to know and gives you the actionable and inspirational information you crave. Wowzers, that’s a lot of crazy amazing stuff. See you there! Sign up for The Moz Top 10 , a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!